Being Dead Page 4

  Eventually the bicycle-bell ringing stopped.

  The good country-air smell did not.

  The next morning I was vaguely aware of my parents getting up and going out. I knew they had meetings with the department heads at the college to talk about their upcoming classes, but that was no reason I had to get up.

  I heard the car doors slam, then the crunch of gravel as their car pulled out of the driveway. I'm not sure if a little or a lot of time passed, but then somebody was knocking on die computer room door.

  "Go away," I mumbled.

  "Brenda?" It was Danny. "Brenda, I'm going over to meet that guy Alec."

  "Good," I called, if it would get him out of the house. Since when did he check in with me?

  Danny said, "But I wanted you to know I didn't have anything to do with it."

  I gathered enough energy to ask, "What are you talking about?"

  "I thought you were up already," he said, "because I heard you in your room—your own room. But when I passed by here, I saw that you were still in here. And then when I went by your room to go downstairs, the door was partway open and I peeked in, so I came back to tell you: I didn't have anything to do with it."

  I didn't like the sound of that.

  As soon as Danny heard my feet hit the floor, he took off running down the stairs, obviously wanting to be out of the house before I investigated.

  What now?

  Actually it was the same old thing, but more so. My clothes were once again out of the closet, but this time some of the plastic hangers were broken and the wire ones twisted, two of my blouses were ripped, and she had evidently wiped her wet and bloody face against my favorite dress. "What do you want?" I screamed at her.

  The phone rang.

  I ran downstairs, picked it up, and shouted, "Leave me alone!" then slammed the phone back down.

  It rang again.

  Be calm, I told myself. She's a little girl, and she's dead, and she's frightened and confused. Never mind that she was frightening and confusing me. I picked up the phone, but I couldn't summon up anything more sympathetic than a snarled "What?"

  There was a slight pause, but at least she didn't ring her stupid bicycle bell at me.

  Then a man's voice spoke: "Telephone company. I've checked the wires to the pole. Just calling to say you're all hooked up."

  I glanced out the kitchen window and could see him perched on his pole, his company truck at the edge of our driveway.

  "Thank you," I managed to say. How could I apologize without making myself out to be even more of a loser: I thought you were someone else—when he'd just connected the line?

  I went back upstairs to pick up my room, yet again, and got dressed. I jammed the ruined clothes into the back of the closet, behind a box of winter clothes. I'd deal with them later.

  As I was making up the bed I had used in the spare room, I could hear a humming and realized the computers were on.

  I took off the blanket I'd thrown on last night and saw, once again, the little girl who had been appearing to me. But this time she looked a lot better. This time she looked not only dry but alive—and smiling.

  Then I realized it wasn't her—it was a picture of her. I clicked on the button to reduce the size of the picture and saw I was looking at the site of the electronic edition of the Buffalo Herald. The picture was part of an article: NEIGHBORS RALLY IN SEARCH FOR LEAH-ANN.

  I read the article. An eight-year-old girl named Leah-Ann Maitland had been missing since some time between six-thirty and eleven-thirty Friday night. Leah-Ann's mother was quoted as saying that she had sent Leah-Ann to her room after the two of them had argued at dinner because Leah-Ann wanted to spend the night at a friend's house. But when Mrs. Maitland herself was ready to go to bed after the eleven o'clock news, she discovered that Leah-Ann was missing. She called the friend's house, but Leah-Ann had not shown up there. Mrs. Maitland walked the two blocks to the friend's house, but there was no sign of Leah-Ann along the way. Next she called her ex-husband, Leah-Ann's father, who lived about five miles away. No Leah-Ann there, either. Then they called the police.

  I hadn't heard about any of this, because Friday night had been my last night in Buffalo. By the time it was on the Saturday news, we had already packed the last of our stuff into two cars and a van and were taking off for the manure-tilled fields of eastern upstate New York.

  Apparently at first the police hoped that Leah-Ann had run away and had gotten lost on her way to her father's—after all, she was only eight and had never before been there on her own. But that hope waned as she didn't show up Saturday, and she didn't show up Sunday. "We're still hopeful," a police spokesperson was quoted as saying. "The feet that her bicycle is missing is a good sign because it may well indicate that she was not abducted from her home but has run away." But the unspoken question was clear: If she simply had gotten lost, or even if she had been hurt—where was she? And why hadn't her bicycle turned up?

  Her bicycle, I thought. That explained the bell, and the helmet.

  The article ended with another quote from the police: "At least the weather is on our side. She's not in danger of exposure."

  I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.

  Oh crap. Exposure was the least of her worries. She was dead, and I was the only one who knew it.

  Or...

  Or maybe I wasn't. Had she been abducted? I wondered. Had she set off for her father's, and some creep picked her up? Picked her up, killed her, and dropped her body off somewhere near here? I thought of her face, gray and bloody. Poor little thing.

  But what could I do? Call the hot-line number and say that maybe they might want to search in Westport because the missing girl's dead spirit was hanging around nearly a hundred fifty miles from the search area?

  I glanced out the window. The computer room is on the end of. the house, so that one window looks over the side yard and one over the back. Out of the back window, I could see the pond.

  ...And the ghost—Leah-Ann—standing there, looking up at me.

  "Wait there!" I yelled. Shouting orders to a ghost Intentionally going out of my way to meet a ghost. But how else was I going to find out what she wanted and get her—eventually—to stop coming to me?

  I ran downstairs, out the back door, into the yard.

  Amazingly, she was still there, though she was beginning to move, heading off toward the driveway, toward the neighbors I now knew to be the Shumways. I took off after her, but she didn't go to the Shumways'; she drifted into our garage. I was sure she would pull her disappearing act again, the way she had with my closet, so I called, "How can I help you if you keep going away?"

  Sure enough, when I stepped into the garage, I couldn't see her. But in a moment my eyes adjusted to the shadows, after the bright sunlight, and there she was, standing with her back to the Honda, as though I'd trapped her. The water still dripped off the ends of her hair that hung below her bicycle helmet. Her face was ... worse than before.

  I tried not to appear disgusted—how could that not distress her?—but it was so hard to look at her. "What do you want from me?" I asked.

  She put her hand to her throat. Did she need the technology of the unconnected phone to make her voice heard? Or—since her ghost body obviously reflected the state of her real body—was she unable to speak anymore because the soft tissues inside her throat had disintegrated already?

  In the silence a fear started in the pit of my stomach: that the reason she didn't answer was because she knew I wouldn't like what she had to say.

  What was the worst possible thing she could want? What was the last thing in the world I would want to face doing? I shuddered. "You want me to tell your parents, don't you? So they don't keep wondering..." Was won dering the right word? "Hoping..." That didn't seem quite it either. "Dreading..."

  Apparently my dithering ticked her off. The ghost that had been Leah-Ann whirled around. Viciously she kicked the Honda's fender. And in the same moment, she disappeared—not in a p
uff of vapor or a quick dissolve, just ... gone.

  "Jeez," I muttered. I leaned in and even in the dim light saw that there was a dent right where the fender met the bumper. "Nasty little thing, aren't you?" I was tempted to call out that if she was going to be like that-ripping my clothes, damaging my parents' car—then she could find somebody else to help her. But I couldn't bring myself to say it. If I were dead and scared, I'd want somebody to be patient with me ... even if being dead had made me surly—which I had to believe it would.

  "Always talk to yourself?" a voice behind me asked.

  I whirled around and saw Michelle peeking into the garage.

  Which might be why Leah-Ann got peeved and took off, I thought, once my brain reconnected and I could breathe again.

  Not wanting Michelle to see how startled I'd been, not wanting to explain, I answered, "Only if there's nobody else to talk to." And before she could ask any more questions, I suggested, "Come to the house and have some zucchini brownies? A nice neighbor girl brought some over yesterday, between plowing the fields and cooking up squirrel meat."

  "Those country gals sure know how to have fun," Michelle said.

  Sitting around the kitchen seemed too much like the farm family in Lassie, so I invited her into the living room, but that was a mistake. The bad smell of the past two days was even worse there.

  "Oh," I said, taking a hasty step back and waving my hand in front of my nose. "Do they ever stop fertilizing?"

  Michelle brushed past me into the living room. "That's not fertilizing," she said, sniffing. "That smells like something died."

  My stomach felt like it dropped to my knees.

  Leah-Ann. That was why she was hanging around here. She had been abducted. And her killer had dumped her body...

  I thought I was going to throw up. It was bad enough seeing a decomposing ghost. The thought that her actual body was here, all this while, near enough to smell...

  Michelle had swept out of the living room, out of the house.

  I didn't blame her.

  But she wasn't going home. I saw her cross the yard, staring at the ground near the house, poking at the bushes.

  She's looking to see what's causing the smell, I realized. She thought it was an animal, and she was going to find the body of a poor little dead girl.

  Even country folk couldn't be used to that.

  "Michelle, wait!" I cried. I set down the tray with our brownies and milk and ran outside.

  My parents were just pulling up in the car. Frantically I waved them over.

  Michelle was crouched down by the overgrown hydrangeas, which didn't look to have been cut back in years.

  "Don't!" I called to her.

  "Raccoon," she said.

  "What?"

  "Like they don't smell bad enough when they're alive."

  I said, "A raccoon died in our bushes?" I was so sure she was wrong—and was seeing maybe just the back of Leah-Ann's head—that I didn't dare look.

  "Could be a fox." Michelle cocked her head for a better look. "But probably not."

  By then my father had crossed the lawn. "What's up?"

  "Dead raccoon," Michelle told him.

  My father looked and made a face. But it was definitely a seeing-a-dead-animal-that-had-to-be-dealt-with face, not a seeing-a-dead-girl face. "I'll get a shovel," he said.

  "I'm going to be sick," I said.

  But at least I made it to the bathroom first.

  ***

  That afternoon Dad went to this place called Zicardi Brothers to get the Honda tuned up and aligned. I wondered if he would notice the dent in the fender. I could just picture myself explaining, "An angry ghost girl kicked it" Yeah, right. Since that was the car I used, my parents would be sure to figure I was to blame. But if he didn't notice until after today, maybe he would think one of the Zicardi brothers had done it.

  Mom knocked on my bedroom door and stuck her head in. Michelle and I were trying on different makeups and were playing CDs so loud, it was probably the second or third time Mom had knocked. "What's this?" she asked.

  When I saw what she was holding, I had trouble keeping my face from showing panic. I pretended I couldn't see what was in her hand. "What have you got?" I asked, stalling for time by lowering the volume of the music. Oh-so-lightly I added, "And where did you get it?"

  To answer the first part, Mom stepped closer to show me. To the second part, she answered, "I found it on my dresser. Did you put it there?"

  On her dresser?

  Did I put it on her dresser?

  "It" was a student ID card for one Isobel Gehris of the State University of New York at Fredonia, whose birthday was early enough in the year that she was legally allowed to buy alcohol.

  "I..." I shook my head.

  Mom shrugged. "Danny must have found it," she said, "in the back of his closet or under the grate of the cold-air return." She pondered it a bit more. "One of the students who lived here must have lost it." She caught herself, for that wouldn't make sense. Fredonia is one hour farther away than Buffalo—quite a daily commute. Still trying to make sense of it, she speculated, "Or someone from Fredonia was visiting one of the kids here." She kept on looking at the card, trying to figure it out.

  Don't be helpful, I wanted to beg her. Don't call Fredonia to try to track this girl down to return it.

  "Oh, well," Mom said.

  If I was lucky, she would forget to ask Danny.

  At least she hadn't found it in my jeans pocket, which was the last place I had put it, because Isobel Gehris looks very much like I do when I wear the right makeup and if I part my hair in the middle.

  Behind me the closet door rattled.

  But only once.

  "Whoa," Michelle said. "Spooks."

  A spook, indeed, who tore through my clothes and put what she found on Mom's dresser.

  There was a knock at the room's door, and all three of us jumped. But it was only Dad. He didn't seem surprised to find Mom there, and he didn't seem to notice the ID card in her hand. "Brenda," he said to me.

  He'd found the dent where Leah-Ann had kicked the car, I could tell, and he thought that I had done it.

  "Michelle," he said, "my wife and I need to talk to Brenda."

  Michelle, who could smell trouble as surely as she could smell dead raccoons, got out of there fast.

  Dad reached over and turned off the CD player. He said, "Brenda—"

  "I know you're going to find this hard to believe," I interrupted. I found it hard to believe, and didn't know how to start.

  "What?" Mom prompted.

  Dad said, "The people at the shop say the Honda has been in an accident."

  Oh, great, I thought. It wasn't even him that noticed.

  Mom was looking from Dad to me. "What kind of accident?"

  How could I ever get them to believe it was a ghost-kicking-the-fender accident?

  Slowly, Dad said, "They had the car up on the lift ... And they showed me underneath..."

  Underneath?

  Dad took a breath and started over again. "They say it looks like something was run over..."

  Mom echoed, "'Something'? Like a bottle?" She had her concentrating expression on. "Or..."

  "Bigger," Dad said. "They had someone from the collision department look at it. He's seen a lot of accidents, and he said right away that something big was hit. Then he found a piece of plastic caught around the shaft, like one of those tassel streamers kids sometimes have on their bicycle handlebars."

  I could hardly breathe. "Not a bicycle," I said. All I had hit had been the curb on the edge of the pavement.

  "There was some blood," Dad finished. "They think someone might have gotten hurt."

  I shook my head. "I didn't..." I couldn't get my voice to work. "I didn't run over anyone on a bicycle," I protested. I hadn't. I knew that.

  "Where did you go Friday night?" Dad asked.

  "To Traci's," I said.

  "Directly to Traci's?" he asked. "And did you stay there the whol
e evening?"

  I hadn't had an accident with the car. I knew I hadn't.

  "We went to pick up Jennie," I admitted—which I wasn't supposed to have done. They had only given me permission to go to Traci's. "And Tina," I grudgingly added. Tina lived way over in Amherst. I wasn't even supposed to be driving after dark, but they had said I could go say good-bye to Traci, four streets over, if I drove carefully. I always drive carefully.

  "Did you stay at Tina's?" Dad asked.

  "No," I admitted. "We went to the park." This was all so confusing. What had Leah-Ann done to me?

  For the first time Dad glanced at the ID in Mom's hand. Apparently he saw the resemblance right away. Very quietly he asked, "Were you drinking?"

  "A little bit," I said, figuring I was in enough trouble, I'd better be honest. "But I didn't have an accident."

  Dad looked gray. Not as gray as Leah-Ann but definitely not well. Mom was crying, soundlessly, the tears pouring down her cheeks, as Dad said, "The people at the car shop are going to be reporting this to the police in Buffalo. The police in Buffalo will have to take a look at all the hit-and-run accidents—"

  "I didn't hit anyone!" I cried. The police in Buffalo had enough to worry about with trying to find Leah-Ann. "We only bought a couple six-packs. Well, three. But I drove very, very carefully."

  I had. We were just driving around, listening to tapes and feeling sorry because it was the last time we were all going to be together.

  I remember fighting, playfully, with Tina, who wasn't as crazy about hearing "Margaritaville" over and over again as I was. I kept rewinding the tape because it seemed the perfect song for a summer night of good-byes, and after a while she got sick of it and she hit FAST FORWARD, and then I hit REWIND, and she hit the button to play the other side, and while I was trying to find "Mar-garitaville" again I accidentally turned the volume up so loud it hurt our ears, so Jennie and Traci both scrambled up from the backseat to lean over to adjust the volume, and we swerved off the road—we were on Hopkins, where it follows Ransom Creek, and there aren't any lights and there isn't any shoulder—so it was like hitting a speed bump when the car went off the road, just for an instant, then another bump and we were back on again, so that Traci and Jennie put their hands up like you do when you're riding a roller coaster, and Tina smacked her head against the dashboard, because she was leaning forward to mess with the buttons some more, and she said if she had any short-term memory loss she was going to have to sue me, but she didn't get hurt, and we didn't hit anything. Or run over anything. Not that I knew of.